Hi.
My name is Janani Ravi,
and welcome to this course on Extracting Data from HTML with Beautiful Soup.
A little about myself.
I have a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford,
and have worked at companies such as Microsoft,
Google, and Flipkart.
At Google,
I was one of the first engineers working on real-time
collaborative editing in Google Docs,
and I hold four patents for the timeline technologies.
I currently work on my own start-up, Loonycorn,
a studio for high-quality video content.
Web scraping is an important technique that is widely used as the
first step in many workflows in data mining,
information retrieval, and text-based machine learning.
In this course,
you will gain the ability to build robust maintainable web-scraping
solutions using the Beautiful Soup library in Python.
First,
you'll learn how regular expressions can be used to scrape web content and
how Beautiful Soup does it better in important ways.
Next, you will discover how Beautiful Soup parses HTML from web content,
fixes up badly formed tags, and builds a clean,
easily traversable parse tree.
You will then see how that parse tree can be used in order
to find and retrieve specific patterns.
Finally,
you'll round out your knowledge by leveraging
advanced features of Beautiful Soup, such as working with CSS and XPath.
When you're finished with this course,
you will have the skills and knowledge to implement
robust web scraping using Beautiful Soup.